Unleashing True Leadership: The Co-Creative Journey
with Steffan Surdek
The Corvus Effect / Episode 32
Released: May 5, 2025
Overview
Steffan Surdek spent the early years of his consulting career being the white knight — going in, parting the waters, doing the magic, and watching everything revert the moment he left. He calls it the Moses Effect, and it’s the trap most leaders fall into when they confuse outcomes with installation. This conversation is about The Way of the Co-Creative Leader — the five skills he’s been teaching for nine years that turn out to still be true — and about why slowing down to build capacity in the team beats fixing it yourself every time.
About Steffan Surdek
Steffan Surdek is the author of The Way of the Co-Creative Leader and a coach with 2,000+ hours reshaping leadership team dynamics worldwide. He came up as a software developer, became the ‘big brother’ on technical teams, and now helps leaders stop inflicting decisions and start co-creating with the people they’re supposed to be developing.
Listen to the Full Episode
Key Takeaways
1. The Moses Effect — change that doesn't survive your departure
Steffan would walk into an organization, the conditions would line up, he’d do the work, and the moment he left, the water came back the way it was before. The diagnosis: he wasn’t teaching anyone the magic; he was just performing it. The fix is unglamorous — slow down, build the team’s capacity, and put up little walls so the water can’t come back the same way it did before.
2. Five skills of co-creative leadership
Steffan’s five (made up nine years ago for a Forbes piece, still true): be a voice among many — your idea gets challenged like everyone else’s; unleash the leaders around you; develop capacity on the team. Then dance with the system — read it before changing it. And learn by doing — most leaders skip the first two skills and call it pace.
3. Bridging IT and business — both think the other isn't listening
Steffan has lived on both sides — technical and business — and the diagnosis is consistent: each thinks the other refuses to listen, and neither is wrong. Business calls IT unreasonable; IT calls business impossible; nobody actually tries to be a partner. The fix is the conversation that should have happened years ago — about how you’ve been working with each other — and it usually starts with someone naming the silence honestly.